Covid-19

ARTICLE: THE LOCKDOWNS NEVER ENDED

Adonis Archontides, Adonis and the Lockdown Tactics, digital video, sound, color, 4’ 05”, 2020, Cyprus.

VRAL is currently presenting The Death Trilogy by Adonis Archontides, a tryptic of works starring his ersatz Sim-clone. To better appreciate the breadth and scope of his video art, we will we will embark on a critical exploration, beginning with Adonis and the Lockdown Tactics.

Archontides’s Adonis and the Lockdown Tactics (2020) is an introspective short machinima created with/in The Sims 4 (2014). Originally developed as part of a broader cultural initiative by the Cypriot Cultural Services during the COVID-19 pandemic, this work was among fifty projects that received accolades for promoting audio-visual creativity in challenging times. This machinima leverages Will Wright’s popular simulation game to explore themes of repetition and monotony, resonating with the enforced isolation and government mandated "social distancing" experienced globally during a series of shelter-in-place initiatives. Watched in 2024, this work feels at once anachronistic and very timely, remote and fresh. 

The premise of Adonis and the Lockdown Tactics is deeply influenced by the Simulation Hypothesis, a concept prevalent in science fiction - and particularly loved by Silicon Valley’s edgelords - where reality as we know it is posited as an elaborate artifice, a cruel joke concocted by a superior, likely malevolent, intelligence. In Archontides’ piece, this “theory” is subtly referenced through the repetitive, looped nature of the Sims’ existence, mirroring the monotony of lockdown life, which seems to have lost its sense of progression, its teleology. The protagonist, a Sim replica of Adonis himself, navigates the so-called daily life in a state of perpetual loop, echoing the equally apathetic anti-hero of…

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Works cited 

Adonis Archontides

Adonis and the Lockdown Tactics

machinima/digital video, color, sound, 4’ 05”, 2020. Cyprus.

This content is exclusive to Patreon subscribers. To gain full access, consider joining our vibrant community.

ARTICLE: FOR A NEW KIND OF GAME TO EMERGE, TRADITIONAL GAMES MUST DIE

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

〰️

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT 〰️

VRAL is currently exhibiting Mikhail Maksimov’ The New Game Is Over. To better contextualize and appreciate his multi-layered oeuvre, we are examining recurring themes in the Russian avant-garde artist oeuvre. Today, we revisit Maksimov’s Infinite Graveyard (2020), which was presented on VRAL as a single channel video.

In the fall of 2020, Matteo Bittanti spoke with Mikhail Maksimov about his new interactive experience, Infinite Graveyard, an endless simulator of passing. The game, which developed and released during the Covid-19 pandemic, came to embody a period of global turmoil and transition. Predictably, the event also represents a missed opportunity for meaningful change. Since then, multiple crises have continued to mount: climate devastation, political paralysis, global conflict, the circus of billionaire-sponsored populism. As if the situation were not already bleak, a new kind of cinematic marketing campaign entitled Barbie has earned over one billion dollars at the box office. It is difficult not to feel a profound sense of despair about the current state of affairs. As Peter Turchin suggests, these times bear the hallmarks of an ending.

In this dreadful landscape is it useful to revisit Infinite Graveyard and the conversation with Maksimov, which felt very apropos in 2020, and clearly prophetic three years later. The Russian artist uses generative art and game elements to explore philosophical questions about death, space, technology, and architecture. He sees the generative process of cellular automata in Infinite Graveyard —which was presented on VRAL as a 666 minute long walkthrough — as representing death and entropy rather than life. The cemetery symbolizes the endless cycle of death. The work itself is meant as an oxymoron, with generative art typically associated with life creation being used to represent endless cessation and death. Today, Maksimov suggests, the creative act has become a record of destruction as creation itself is no longer possible.

This outcome has a myriad of implications, including many related to game design. For Maksimov, it is very important to subvert common video game tropes like respawning and disposable non-player characters to make philosophical statements…

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

This is a Patreon exclusive content. For full access consider joining our growing community.

ARTICLE: TRANSHUMANIST LANDSCAPES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Mikhail Maksimov, S.A.R. Online Sessions, online game, 2021 [2020]

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

〰️

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT 〰️

VRAL is currently exhibiting Mikhail Maksimov’ The New Game Is Over. To better contextualize and appreciate his multi-layered oeuvre, we will examine several works by the Russian avant-garde artist. Today we discuss the groundbreaking Sanatorium Anthropocene Retreat: Online Sessions (2021).

Russian artist Mikhail Maksimov continues his avant-garde explorations of technology, culture and identity in his interactive artwork, S.A.R. Online Sessions. Developed as an extension of his S.A.R. project for the 17th Venice Biennial of Architecture’s Russian Pavilion in 2020, this multiplayer video game offers players an immersive journey through virtual realms where posthumanism and transhumanism take center stage. For the record, S.A.R. stands for Sanatorium Anthropocene Retreat.

Awakening within a deserted digital replica of the Russian Pavilion during the heights of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, participants embody a protean entity bereft of identity. Through each interaction within the abandoned ruins, their avatar cycles through human, non-human, and posthuman forms—from sleek android to microscopic virus. This fluid transformation catalyzes a meta-exploration of anthropocentrism’s limitations and new frontiers of interconnection that transcend humanity’s constraints.

Maksimov utilizes the medium of gaming to examine anti-anthropocentric philosophies like antihumanism, posthumanism, and transhumanism. Players piece together fragments from a dystopian future while their ever-evolving virtual identity becomes a conduit for contemplating the Anthropocene’s dawn and the inevitable end of human reign. Themes of environmental collapse, consolation, and care emerge within the game’s decaying digital landscape.

Interestingly, the Russian artist releases all his work on Steam and itch.io, because he argues that contemporary art could be effective only if it is widely accessible. In an interview with Metal magazine contributor Lucy McLaughlin, he stated: “the distribution of video games, as opposed to cinema and contemporary art, does not depend on curatorial arbitrariness and isn’t linked to the cinema industry, which imposes restrictions on the artist.” Game power to the people.

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

This is a Patreon exclusive content. For full access consider joining our growing community.

VIDEO: THE POETICS OF GAME SPACES

Patreon-exclusive content

〰️

Patreon-exclusive content 〰️

The poetics of video game spaces: On Fumi Omori’s Home Sweet Home

A video essay by Matteo Bittanti 


PART ONE

Fumi Omori’s latest project Home Sweet Home delves into the young Japanese artist’s intimate tapestry of personal recollections and her playful documentation of frequent relocations both IRL and within the virtual environments of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. 

Her nomadic history, characterized by a succession of relocations around the world in the past few years, finds solace in the poignant stillness of captured photographs, a portal to the emotional entanglements woven into past physical spaces. Nestled within the cherished folds of this beloved game, Nintendo’s Animal Crossing, which emerged as a sanctuary amidst the disquietude of the 2020-2021 Covid-19 pandemic, the artist crafts bespoke chambers that bear testament to their very essence.

Home Sweet Home is an investigation into the ramifications of transposing corporeal abodes into the virtual landscapes of video game spaces, which are “inhabited” by around two billion people as we speak, at least according to the latest statistics. Employing the technique of photogrammetry, Omori undertook the playful reconstruction of her former dwellings within the game, thereby obfuscating the demarcations between reality and imagination, leaving the viewer awash in a sea of architectural reverie, both deeply personal and utterly generic, as these apartments evoke the classic IKEA principles of impermanence, interchangeability, and transience. The interplay that ensues between these competing ideas of domesticity but also between these planes of reality — one corporeal, the other intangible — affords a tantalizing glimpse into a distinct visual hacking methodology, a véritable trompe-l’oeil.

In an extensive interview, the artist mentioned that the genesis of this project took root at ECAL the prestigious École cantonale d’art de Lausanne, and was set into motion by the visionary digital curator Marco De Mutiis of Fotomuseum Winterthur as part of a workshop on Automated Photography. Notably, this marks the third installment - following the lauded contributions of Benjamin Freedman and Moritz Jekat, to grace the fourth season of VRAL — a testament to the platform’s unwavering commitment to championing burgeoning talents alongside their venerable counterparts, an approach advocated by both Bittanti and the discerning Italian emigré, De Mutiis. It is not by chance, then, that these three works share common concerns for such issues as memory, belonging, and loss.

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

This is a Patreon exclusive video. To access the full content consider joining our growing community.

ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT BRENT WATANABE’S MINE

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

〰️

PATREON-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT 〰️

Brent Watanabe’s MINE (2023) was featured on VRAL between May 19 and June 1 2023 as a single channel video. It is now available on the artist’s website as a collection videos. In this deep dive, we discuss the artwork’s main themes, its relation with previous projects, and the role of the artist walkthrough as documentation.

Brent Watanabe’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons All Mine (2020) and MINE (2021-2022), are intricately connected. The shared presence of the possessive pronoun “mine” in both titles serves as a manifest thread, while the thematic affinities evoke the practice of consumption, accumulation, and hoarding.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons All Mine made its debut during the inaugural season of VRAL in 2020 (e9), in the format of a video walkthrough encapsulating Watanabe’s astute intervention within the popular Nintendo cozy game.In his accompanying statement, the artist divulged his solace-seeking escapades within the realm of ludic escapades during the mandated domestic quarantine, with Animal Crossing emerging as a popular destination and source of refuge for the masses enduring “house arrest”. However, his initial enthusiasm rapidly devolved into disillusionment as he became acutely aware of the game’s real values and prerogatives, goals and mechanics fostering an insidious consumerist ethos. In fact, Watanabe expressed being “taken aback by the endless cycle of purgatory-like existence: waking up, completing rote tasks, consuming, upgrading, discarding, repeating.” In other words, the purported “new horizons” of Animal Crossing lack… novelty. Furthermore, they do not encompass a multitude of possibilities. Instead, a singular horizon emerges, and it is none other than the horizon of consumption.

Instead of shunning the mind-numbing ordeal concocted by the Japanese mega-brand, Watanabe embarked on an acceleratepursuit of hyper-capitalist imperatives, fully immersing himself in the most extravagant and hyperbolic forms of simulated consumption. Over the course of 150+ hours of gameplay, he thoroughly paved the entirety of the virtual island with digital asphalt, while ceaselessly accumulating a vast array of consumer goods, meticulously displaying and piling them upon every available pixel of the landscape. A special kind of window shopping. Remarkably, Watanabe accomplished this impressive feat without resorting to gameplay modifications, in order to bring to the surface the game’s inherent ideological underpinnings. This captivating experience was conscientiously documented as a walkthrough, hereby elevated to the status of video art. Notably, the artwork also exists as a virtual island, accessible to anyone armed with the appropriate codes, and conveniently accessible through the dedicated artwork page. In short, the work can be experienced on multiple levels.

For instance,

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

This is a Patreon exclusive article. To access the full content consider joining our growing community.

EVENT: FUMI OMORI (JUNE 2 - 15 2023, ONLINE)

HOME SWEET HOME

machinima/digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 2’ 35”, Japan, 2023

Created by Fumi Omori

Home Sweet Home explores personal memories and their translation into physical architecture through Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With a history of frequent relocations, the artist captured their rooms in photographs, preserving emotional connections to past spaces. Animal Crossing, a beloved game providing an idyllic refuge during the Covid-19 pandemic, allowed the artist to craft personalized rooms reflecting their personality. This project questions the impact of translating real-life spaces into the virtual realm. Employing photogrammetry, the artist reconstructs their past homes in the game, blurring boundaries with imaginative architecture. The interplay between virtual and physical layers offers a fresh perspective, showcasing a unique visual hacking method. Automating realities on the virtual plane reveals the intricate relationship between our fragile understanding of reality and memories. Digital reverie becomes an avenue for escapism, confronting the present, future, nostalgia, and denial.

Fumi Omori navigates the crossroads of the cultural diaspora with her transcendent visual language. Currently nearing the culmination of her master’s degree in photography at the esteemed École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) in Switzerland, Omori’s diverse experiences serve as a potent source of inspiration. Born and raised in Japan, the artist spent over a decade living in prominent American coastal cities (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco) before gravitating towards the medium of photography. Her previous stints as a perceptive graphic designer and discerning art director have indubitably permeated her artistic vision.